2: Two Out of Three
When we say that a Black or Latino/a/x student “beat the odds” what do we mean? This personal narrative interrogates our implicit racial biases and how they impose themselves on individuals of color.
Two Out Of Three
Working with kids I had an affinity with - kids who I had once been like – has helped me find direction. That started while I was working in the private sector, when I supported kids in a number of ways in my free time, including living in a college dorm helping students build community, and eventually led to my transition into a career in education.
Working with young people also made me start asking deeper questions about the “odds.” Those questions had always been forming, but they started to coalesce in this new space.
Odds for me as a child, given where I grew up, were that I would likely end my education after high school, stay local, and perhaps work for the paper mill. Maybe I would get a job with a human service agency like the one I spent my summers working for, where my hourly rate at minimum wage as a high schooler was almost the same as what people who had been working there for twenty years made. Those aren’t bad odds for a lot of people.
I just didn’t want to stay local given the other pressures I felt, one being the regular strum of anti-black racism. I also didn’t want uncertain job stability, as I stressed, even then, about being able to pay my bills and keep a roof over my head. For many reasons, I wanted to leave my rural community to see what else was out there.
Coupled with the small-town odds though, were the very real odds of being a Black male in America, which even growing up in a rural community still meant I was more likely to have run-ins with the law, struggle for employment, make less in my lifetime, have more health complications, and more, compared to my White counterparts.
Three Brothers
As an adult, I know how odds and probabilities work, and that I had some individual agency within my situation. But try to tell that to my fifteen-year-old self, who felt as though these “odds” were soldered into my brain. I didn’t know how to successfully navigate out of the place I was in and that terrified me.
I also held a rather immature belief, one that many of us who grow up in rural communities hold, that I had to leave my hometown to succeed. I thought I might as well try college as the next stop, given that my parents had emphasized its importance.
My odds improved rather substantially with my college selection. I ended up choosing my college randomly, based on the brochures I liked. One in particular made it into my five picks because the cover had a tall good looking light-skinned Black kid standing with two pretty young women. I saw someone who looked like me and without knowing anything about this guy other than the story I made up in my head about him, I aspired to be him.
My options had also been narrowed down by my older brother Shane’s pick. Shane had chosen a school in Phoenix, and my parents couldn’t afford to fly more than one of us to and from school every year from where we lived in upstate New York. So my college had to be within driving distance.
One of the five colleges I chose, the one whose brochure had the cover with the pretty girls, gave me a sizeable financial aid package, at least twice what the next closest offered, which helped make it my father’s top choice. It helped me feel better about affording it, as I had just been turned down by the Negro Scholarship Fund.
The odds turned out to be in my favor again when I struggled academically and my college was there to support students like me. They had the resources to make sure students, no matter where they start, make it through to graduate. I got those supports even when I wasn’t seeking them out. I was also within a three-hour drive home and could lean on our family for extra support when I needed it. My odds were improved by sports, which was a place I could build self-esteem.
When my older brother Shane went to get his associate’s degree at a tech school, he was also across the country and largely on his own. We both had a difficult time with our transitions and the academic expectations of schools that were much more rigorous than our high school had been. But, I had outlets where I could reinforce my sense of self-value. I had something that made me feel good in the face of all the places that made me feel inferior. Shane didn’t have that. So my older brother’s odds were not as good.
I have always known how intelligent Shane is. He can take apart and put back together almost anything. He could do that when we were young too, although he is better at it now. I know he worked harder than me at everything my parents asked us to do when we were kids, from feeding the farm animals to collecting firewood to shoveling the driveway. I wasn’t a slouch, though my parents will point out that I complained the whole time. Shane was next level – “Mr. Reliable” - and helped my parents do just about anything they asked of him with a smile on his face and no objections. He was thorough and did a task until it was done. He still does, making him a model employee in the jobs he has today.
Back then I knew Shane wasn’t feeling the four-year degree path and was interested in pursuing a career in fixing anything with a motor. He knew what he wanted far more than I ever did at that age. He had his pathway picked out. And yet, somewhere along his journey, the odds went against him.
He experimented with drugs like many people do, but it became a dependency, and one that no one in our immediate family was equipped to help him out of. As a consequence, he had early run-ins with the Phoenix police that escalated with every subsequent encounter. In their eyes, he was a Black male and a target of the war on drugs--a threat to be apprehended and locked away--not a person in need of support and counseling.
If I am honest, I think my family and I believed that too. We had been conditioned to think of drug abuse as a deep moral individual failure, and that it was on the individual to resolve their addiction through strength of character and will. This was the 90s and the prevailing sentiment was that drugs were bad and you had to have the moral conviction to either avoid them or overcome them. The notion of rehabilitation and treating addiction humanely was not a mainstream idea.
What I recall from that time is vague given I was preoccupied with my own struggles to make it through my first year of college and Shane doesn’t even fully recollect the sequence of events. He started messing around with drugs, which did not take long to grow into a full-blown dependency. As his addiction ramped up it accelerated his trouble with the law. The sequence of escalating events was too rapid for my parents to monitor from across the country. Most of it happened without them knowing a thing, including the first time Shane was arrested and spent time in jail.
All of those moments add up, and quickly when you are Black in urban America. The more trouble he ended up in the further away from help he became. Every time he lost, the odds became more difficult the next time.
So Shane’s story became the quintessential tale of a Black male in prison. Shane has spent much of his adult life battling addiction and caught up in the criminal justice system. He will tell you that much of his situation was based on decisions he made. I will tell you that some of his situation has to do with the context he was navigating.
By chance, he chose a school that did not have the same supports I had found in my college. His tech school hadn’t offered extracurricular activities including sports as mine had – other places to thrive when the academics weren’t working – places that had been incredibly important for me. As the firstborn, he didn’t have the same opportunities to learn from my missteps as I did from any he would make. By chance, he was in a situation where the odds were steeper, and the decisions he made came with more risk.
Comparing my older brother’s experience to my own made me really reflect on the differences in our situations and our choices as siblings. More, it made me start to look at the odds imposed on us throughout society, wherever we come to expect people to succeed or fail based on their race or gender.
Often we do this unconsciously and with absolutely no evidence for how the “odds” should play out other than the outcomes we have already. The racially stratified outcome data are compelling when they confirm our preconceived ideas about racial superiority and inferiority. After all, if the data show a group consistently underperforms others, doesn’t that mean they are inferior?
We will come back to what the data actually tell us later. For right now, I want you to know that for me and my brothers the prevailing narrative - the odds we were taught if you will - was that Black people mostly fail and White people mostly succeed. Larger society made this lesson abundantly clear to us despite all the work my parents put in to teach their three boys otherwise. To expect a different outcome was to expect the exception to the rule – to expect that we would somehow become that exceptional Black person who “beat the odds.”
Comparing my older brother’s situation and my own was in part why I stopped solely fixating on the efforts of individuals and began considering the context those individuals are operating within.
My younger brother Gabi “beat the odds” too. He saw me graduate and take a job in Boston around the same time he saw Shane go to prison. Gabi knew that if I could get through my college, then given his stronger academic track record in our hometown school, he certainly could as well. Those were better odds than other schools or postgraduate destinations he might have been considering, so he followed me to Williams.
Gabi struggled as I had, but also found a strong support system in place for kids like us and got his degree. He hit his snags. Back then they seemed so significant, and today they feel so trivial - getting caught by the police trying to buy alcohol underage and made to do community service, getting caught with contraband by college security, and having to meet with the Dean, learning how to manage the rigor of the academics.
I look back now and see that a number of his missteps, the kind of things many kids do, were penalized more harshly than his peers. His wealthy friends had lawyers and powerful parents to get them out of community service or negotiate with the college administration about discipline. Gabi made apologies and was willing to make up for mistakes with hard work. That worked out given the context he was in. Ultimately he was in a place that was focused on him succeeding, so those lessons didn’t cost him as much as they might have otherwise.
After college Gabi went to work for a law firm, serving in a data position that he created for the organization. Gabi now runs his own data consulting business and is married with a daughter and a son and living in New York. He continues to “beat the odds.”
Our older brother Shane is finally “beating the odds” himself. He was granted compassionate release in 2020 due to his health as COVID was ravaging prisons. According to national data, nearly 4 out of 5 people released from prison are arrested again within 5 years[1]. Those are his odds today. Shane hasn’t been out for that long yet, but thus far he has taken full advantage of his freedom. He has a steady job, a role as a leader within a rehabilitation housing program, and has stayed drug-free. The odds are still ever present for all of us though, and his look very different today than mine or Gabi’s.
But it wasn’t more than three years ago when Shane was pleading with me to go west and connect with his two little boys. In his own words at that time, “I am not sure I will make it.” I don’t need to elaborate much here, as the conditions he lived in were violent and awful. He wasn’t confident in his odds.
“Making It”
Before my brother’s release, l believed that two out of three of us had “made it,” even if I didn’t speak those words aloud. “Making it” simply meant having a decent life with a roof over our heads and three solid meals a day. My parents weren’t looking for us to be doctors or lawyers or presidents. They just wanted us to be happy and healthy.
For our family, especially my parents, two out of three were terrible odds, as they are for any family when we are talking about their children. I certainly don’t want to oversimplify the reasons our odds were what they were, but after years of reflecting it really came down to a couple of key things.
One, we did not have the kind of schooling that readied us for post-secondary education. My hometown K-12 public school prepared and implicitly encouraged kids to stay nearby and work in blue-collar roles for places like the paper mill. College was for the handful of “overachievers,” but not something the majority of us were inspired to pursue. To illustrate this point, my graduating class of around twenty students saw four of us get married and three of us go on to college.
Two, our internal sense of self was under assault in the face of the racism that was a very real and explicit part of our experience as children. And regardless of what my parents wanted us to believe in our hearts or did to shield us from racists, it was next to impossible to repel the anti-Blackness all around us. Those demons were and still are very palpable for all three of us. My older brother and I routinely talk about racist incidents we experienced together. My younger brother had the misfortune of having to fend for himself once Shane and I had left home, and still bares those scars.
Don’t get me wrong. Much of growing up in Crown Point, NY was beautiful and many of the people I grew up with are still dear friends. There was, however, a really potent layer of bigotry that was always present while we lived there. That left its mark on all three of us in ways that we are each still working through. Those scars are not that different from the ones borne by kids of color growing up in other parts of the US, and research shows that they can subconsciously impact performance. I can tell you firsthand that they consciously do as well, as they eroded our self-esteem.
Back when we were K–12 students, my brothers and I were at the bottom of the Achievement Gap, at least compared to national standards, despite how we may have performed academically relative to our local White peer group, many of who came from high-poverty backgrounds. For example, the high scores for SATs where I grew up were in the low 1300s, and only one or two students ever achieved that score. Meanwhile, the average SAT at many of the highly-selective colleges and universities was at least 200 points higher. I got an 1160, which was the third-highest score for my school that year. In comparison, wealthy boarding schools like Phillips Academy have an annual average SAT in the mid-1400s. The average SAT scores for Ivy League colleges and universities, often places where many graduates from these well-resourced prep high schools matriculate, are in the high 1400s and low 1500s. For reference, the highest score for the SAT is 1600.
The odds my brothers and I faced, even as rural kids, were closer to those encountered by poor Black and Latinx/a/o urban kids than they were to those affecting the majority of kids. I see my brothers and me in the urban students I have spent much of my career working to serve. Like them, we had under-resourced schools struggling to prepare us for post-secondary opportunities and we were fighting the world’s reminders of our inferiority on a daily basis. That combination is toxic to children like us.
The Context Matters
Further complicating matters is the reality that hard work still matters. Yet, in crediting what we deem as achievement we often overlook equal effort put in by those who don’t “achieve” as much. Struggle and achievement in a context with steeper odds that lead to people not achieving as much wealth, fame, or positional status as their White counterparts, often get discounted when compared to the struggle of those with easier odds who do accumulate more of those things. Accomplishments that within their context are incredible get lost in the face of prevailing standards for success that have been established by dominant White affluent culture.
These conditions are what establish the odds. What is interesting to me is our hypocrisy about the odds. We, as a larger society, routinely acknowledge the odds when People of Color overcome them by achieving the wealth, fame, and/or positional status that set them apart from all but largely White people with the same achievements.
On the flip side, until recently, we have ignored the advantages many White achievers benefited from. We tell the American Dream stories in our daily news, whether we are talking about Microsoft, Facebook, Tesla, Netflix, or Amazon. We take White, largely male, entrepreneurial genius for granted, as if it is to be expected to be so abundant. We don’t blink an eye at the racialization of wealth concentration, where according to a 2020 report by the Brookings Institute, less than 1% of the top 1% of wealthy US families identify as Black[2]. In fact, Forbes reported 571 White US billionaires in 2020 and only 5 were Black ones. Brookings points out that a proportionate representation of Black billionaires to the overall population would be a count of 80, yet there are only 1/16th of that number and we assume that is somehow natural.
All these facts leave us with two options. One, we can accept that there are no odds, and race really is the differentiator. We can believe that Black and Latinx/a/o people aren’t as wealthy or successful, because they are indeed inferior.
Our second option is that we can recognize the odds are stacked against some groups and not against others. Apologies to the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of the world, as your accomplishments are indeed exceptional. But I would argue there are an equivalent number of Black and Latinx/a/o Musks and Bezoses who never got the same opportunities because the odds were too steep. We miss out on their brilliance because our system strips them of their opportunities to shine.
The Gap
So, yeah, my life’s work is about dismantling the Achievement Gap in education. I find it personally offensive. I look at it and see a lie that promotes racist arguments of the exceptional Black and Latinx/a/o student and thus discounts the majority of Black and Latinx/a/o students with just as much talent, but who have succumbed to systemic factors beyond their control. I see a lie that reinforces the social construct of race, an idea that has caused more torment and harm in this world than just about any other. I see a lie that perpetuates a subconscious belief in White superiority. I see a lie that says Shane’s life is one my parents should have expected. Two out of three is pretty good for Black kids.
Right?
The Achievement Gap reinforces the same crass arguments I heard in high school where someone would try to explain to me how I was Black to them, but Shane was a N*gger. I am sure he heard the reversed version of that argument from friends of his who weren’t feeling me for whatever reason. This argument reflected the implicit odds even our White peers around us saw for us. Whichever one of us was wearing the “Black” designation on any given day was seen as having better odds of “making it” in society, whereas the N*gger could expect to end up a “failure” - in prison, an addict, leeching off society, unemployed, or worse – “just like most N*ggers do.”
There is no equivalent argument of odds for comparing White siblings that I have heard or know of. This was a literal verbalization of the odds to us through very explicit racism. I despise the Achievement Gap. It’s a lie that harms me every day I come to work and every time I look at a chart of student outcomes.
That said, I still believe education is the most powerful avenue by which lives and generations of lives to follow can be positively transformed, along with the communities these lives reside in. What is clear though, is that access to that transformative educational opportunity is predicated on our collective acknowledgment and addressing of past harm represented by our idea of “the odds.” Until we recognize how our past hamstrings certain families of color today, we will continue to lack the empathy to invest at the levels we must in order to rectify that harm and the Achievement Gap will remain.
The Time is Now
As I am writing this, books about white privilege, white fragility, and anti-racism are flying off shelves as people, especially White people, seek to educate themselves on systemic racism, historic prejudices and wrongs, and how to be a true ally in the fight for a more fair and just society.
This desire for education stems in great part from the world’s awakening to tacit racism that in 2020 followed the incident of Amy Cooper in New York’s Central Park, the murders of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, and Breonna Taylor’s death at the hands of Louisville police. These recent events have created an appetite for recognizing and dismantling systems of oppression in this country that feel heartier than the superficial efforts of the past.
To which, I exhaustedly say, “Finally.”
Perhaps this moment will provide the clarity we need to stop thinking of these daunting challenges in isolation from one another and see their more insidious roots. It is too simplistic to say we have a police problem or an education problem or a violence problem. What we have is a racism problem, as all of these issues are simply the outgrowths of the discriminatory policies we established many seasons ago.
We will not be able to curb violence, restore trust in the police, close gaps in educational outcomes, ensure equitable healthcare, generate equivalent wealth for all people, or close any other unjust discrepancy between people, without committing to address the underlying racial problem. The long-term vitality of our region, and I would argue our morality, depends on true racial healing and reconciliation. Central to that reconciliation, and ultimately to our salvation, is the education of our children - all of them.
In the pages that follow, we will start by unpacking the Achievement Gap, and demonstrating how it isn’t actually measuring achievement at all. We will then explore a number of domains that inform our daily life-- housing, policing, healthcare, jobs, and more.--and show how the racism structured into these systems creates the Achievement Gap we find in educational outcome statistics.
By recognizing the impact of structural racism on the Achievement Gap, we can begin to shift our mindset on how we might eliminate this gap because we are forced to move away from focusing on individuals and instead must consider how the systems around us influence those individuals in racialized ways. This prompts us to specifically seek out ways to undo the social construct of race that is omnipresent in our everyday thoughts and actions.
In that light, we will explore the model of reconciliation that the German people have been committed to implementing since the end of World War II and consider how we may apply a similar approach in the Chicago region with education as the focal point.
As we look at the impact of structural racism on educational achievement, I will use personal narrative to provide a sense of how the racial issues that I discuss play out in real life. It is often through our stories that we find affinity and develop empathy for one another. Our stories are a way to create proximity, which spurs a deeper understanding of each other as human beings. My goal is to bring statistics and data to life by showing you firsthand how they affect and continue to influence my family and me.
Throughout this book, I use the pronoun “we” to speak to those who believe that positive lasting change can be realized through reconciliation - an enduring commitment to acknowledgment, apology, and genuine healing of past harms. Using the word “we” is also meant to show that we all have a responsibility in shaping a better Chicagoland for all children. Whether you live in the city proper, the nearby suburbs, or further away, I hope that you will see yourself as part of this larger “we.”
[1] Bureau of Justice Statistics. (2016). Recidivism of Prisoners Released in 30 States in 2005: Patterns from 2005 to 2010 (Update) (Publication No. NCJ 244205). U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs. https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/rprts05p0510_st.pdf
[2] Brookings Institution. (2020, December 9). Closing the racial wealth gap requires heavy progressive taxation of wealth. Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/research/closing-the-racial-wealth-gap-requires-heavy-progressive-taxation-of-wealth/
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